‘Know How’ or ‘Know That’?

**I know that moving the pedals forward moves a bike. I know that holding on to the handlebars and turning them when appropriate will steer the bike. I know that squeezing the right lever on the handle bars will engage the rear brake and slow down the bike’s momentum. Do I know how to ride a bike?

Intellectually, I can explain to someone how to ride a bike, but this sense of ‘how’ does not imply that I can or have the ability to do so. Having the ability to ride a bike involves some sort of practical knowledge, but the practical knowledge seems distinct from having intellectual knowledge. Practical knowledge often times requires dispositional abilities—I might not be able to intellectualize how to ride a bike, but I can do it. Know-how of the dispositional sort seems to conflict with our standard intuition of the concept ‘knowledge’.

One question that we should ask is how distinct are ‘knowledge-that’ and ‘knowledge-how’?

Answers to this question will have ramifications for normative areas of study as well. For instance, consider an obsessive compulsive agent who continuously washes her hands over and over. She knows that she ought not do it excessively. But she does not know how to stop washing her hands continuously. This example shows that we can hold beliefs about what we ought to do, but we don’t know how to carry out the beliefs. Consequently, one may be intellectually rational in her deliberation on how to act, but fail to carry out the appropriate action that accords with her practical reasoning (here weakness of will or akrasia comes to mind). This, I think, may have an interesting impact on practical rationality, ethics, and other normative fields. This also brings forth a few other interesting questions.

Does not having the ability to “intellectualize” how you ride a bike mean that you do not have the ‘know that’ knowledge that seems to be a necessary requirement to have ‘know-how’ knowledge. Or, maybe know-that is not necessary for know-how knowledge. Is know-thatknowledge simply a recognition of (or knowledge of) normative obligations? Is this the only knowledge that is connected to epistemic evaluations? Ah! So many questions…

Thoughts?

**This post is a culmination of a prior post by a colleague and an ensuing discussion that followed. It has been modified for Aphilosopherstake.com

Interesting way to put it. I just think there are two types of knowledge. I’m not sure we can “know everything to do with cycling by studying books”. I think we must be able to ride a bike as well to know everything there is to know about cycling. Part of what it is to cycle is knowing how to balance. I’m not sure that a book can tell us about that. Maybe it can though, I’m not sure.

Here’s a thought: Wisdom is knowing how to apply knowledge. So, if the reading of the books led to me being able to ride then maybe it’s complete knowledge. However, I’m not sure I can learn things by reading, not physical things anyway. I learned by getting out there and experimenting with different ways on how to balance, maybe others have experiences that they could share regarding how they learned everything there is to know about something by simply reading about it. This reminds me of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Maybe there is a difference between physical knowledge and intellectual knowledge? Related but very different?

Knowledge-that and knowledge-how can support each other; for instance, I have the knowledge of how to ride a bike, I have the knowledge that the reason I don’t fall off the bike is because of the momentum of the bike moving forward as I push the pedals round and round. The question of why knowledge-that does not always guarantee a logical action by a person, ethical or otherwise, is not in my opinion about knowing how to act that way. Sometimes our actions are driven by emotion rather than knowledge.

But can’t emotions be a form of knowledge? Depends on what role one thinks emotions play in the world. For instance, some think that they give us knowledge of what is moral. I’m skeptical of that claim, however, it is something to think about.

Ok, so only if a thing is learned can it be knowledge? You might be right but there are examples that I would look at as knowledge that seem to have not been learned, for instance a baby KNOWS how to drink milk from it’s mother. I’m not coming up with any others at the moment and maybe that’s telling in itself.

An old disconnect in literature as well. The difference between testimony and experience is much like the disconnect between the ‘how’ and the ‘that.’ Marlowe comes to mind, from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ He knows so much about Colonel Kurtz, he obsesses over the man. What he reads about him and what he sees as he grows nearer on the river give him all the knowledge he needs to know that Kurtz works in certain ways, but without stepping into the man himself, he can never know the truth of the experience, and it becomes mere testimony. Like reading cycling magazine your whole life and dreaming of trying it, but never quite mustering up the courage to do it.

Thank you for the link. I will check this out and let you know. Re reading my comment I feel I have not done Conrad justice in my pretty striking over simplification of the idea. The disconnect– the rift between testimony vs experience in Heart of Darkness is much more reflective of the nature of existence and Truth. A sort of asymptotic nature where as close as you may come total crossing of the threshold between the investigation and the result, as it were, is not possible.

I suppose, and I haven’t read what you’ve sent me yet, that my argument against testimony as knowledge would be that testimony alone does not provide the beholder with adequate justification for their belief. It depends, of course, on how we define knowledge. Some may not feel that justification is a necessary aspect of it.

I read about an experiment that relates to what you’re saying here. If you ask someone to tell you how they change lanes when driving, they will say “turn the wheel left (or right) then straighten.” That is actually not how it’s done (you need to turn the wheel back right (or left) before you straighten) but our brain constructs a narrative that doesn’t fit with what we unconsciously know how to do. To me, “instinctive” knowledge (such as knowing how to play a song) should also be considered knowledge, though our inability to communicate it properly (or even to access it consciously) puts in in a different level from conscious, rational knowledge.

The Ordinary Language philosopher Gilbert Ryle had thought that the “instinctive knowledge” that you have described is the know-how. He held that knowledge-how is rooted in dispositions, e.g. I have the disposition to be able to ride a bike. The dispositions are not described in terms of conscious mental states.

“…we can hold beliefs about what we ought to do, but we don’t know how to carry out the beliefs”

rightly said. here is some stuff from my recent research that might connect with what you have to say…

descriptive thinking concerns what is (isn’t) or has been (not been)

normative thinking concerns what must or should or ought to be (not be)

formative thinking concerns what can (cannot) be

in the above types of thinking, formative is least common and often people equate “what is or has been” with “what ought to be”. it is only through formative thinking and experiential learning that possibilities and plausibility can be consolidated.

also, at an engineering level, rather than a philosophical level, it is difficult for me to talk about a system’s knowledge but i can talk about its memory i.e. stored information.

consider a human individual as a system and their environment as an extended, coupled system. if information is stored in neurological networks (brain, spinal chord, nerves, etc) within the human, the information is likely to be declarative. for instance i have memory about a city called london which is in a region of the world called uk though i have never been anywhere near those places.

if however the information is stored in an extended network of musculo-skeletal system coupled with the environment, apart from the neural network, then that information is likely to be experiential or procedural. for example, i have a bottle of water in my hand right now, i can see it, touch it, hear it crackle in my hands, operate on it by emptying it out or filling it, etc.

so declarative memory and procedural memory are two important concepts which can better operationalize our research into cognition and rationality of systems, not only human beings.

eventually, the philosopher in me wakes up and i ask, “is knowledge possible without memory?”

knowledge necessarily entails memory so I go ahead and posit that having memory is the same thing as having knowledge. however the type of memory available at a given time as well as the type of couplings within the systems do matter.

Quick question: if I don’t have memory that I can recall regarding say riding a bike, but I know how to ride a bike, do I have knowledge of how to ride a bike? In other words, do I need to be able to recollect in order to have knowledge, or is the fact that I can ride a form of recollection? I guess this question is related to what you were saying regarding how different memory works. I’m just curious if you think that all memory = knowledge?

Also, what about instinctual sorts of things where I don’t have memory? For instance, the example raised by David Yerle regarding instinct. Do I have knowledge then? Intuitively I would want to say yes however there is no memory doing work, or at least there doesn’t seem to be unless we posit some really spooky metaphysical claims.

I’d be interested in hearing how instinct could be discussed under the guise of memory. If it can be accounted for then maybe memory is necessary for knowledge?

yes, i say that all memories are knowledge. knowledge is usually explained with respect to the concepts of psyche and situation. i contest that the psyche extends beyond the biological envelope of an organism and is embedded within an environment. any situation is ecological i.e. it is a function of the organism as well as the environment.

all of those things that you mentioned about instinct are types of memories storied in various places. that is why i had, earlier, stressed on the notion of network and the definition of system. if the memory is embedded within a neurological network it is likely to be the one accessible by your psychological faculty to articulate. if however the memory is embedded within your body+environment the memory is unlikely to be amenable to articulation. there are a lots of thought processes that are out of reach of conscious thinking. those processes are usually termed as reflex.

most lay persons consider explicit memory as memory and implicit memory as intuition. but actually, all of those things are quite simply memory.

in order to explain implicit memory, implicit cognition and subconsciousness one need not look towards metaphysics. one only needs to look at the speed of communication processes and modularity within networks. in neural networks, for example, most communication processes are highly dynamical, quick and automated due to which they are not part of conscious thinking (such as reflexes). and what one module is doing, need not be completely accessible to another module e.g. signals from taste buds aren’t sent to the visual cortex of the brain, meaning, taste shouldn’t inspire visions in you. however among people who have high level of synesthesia taste and touch ends up inspiring sounds and visions. and in reality, all of us are synesthetic to some extent.

it is also important to understand the definition of memory…

take a sheet of paper. make a fold in it and then unfold the sheet. do you see a crease? that crease exhibits the sheet’s memory. persistence of a physical configuration is defined as memory (inertia). in the case of human thoughts the memory is related to persistence within synaptic activities. change in memory is due to change in physical configuration (entropy). in human thoughts the synapses experience different neurotransmitters which produce a change in the synapses’ configuration which cascades into changes in the configuration of a neuron which… eventually, can result in a macro level change (thought or action experienced by an organism). the neurotransmitters were released in the first place due to signal transduction through the sensory organs accepting inputs from the environment.

all physical configurations have memory, at least of themselves. it is when a physical configuration has a memory (representation) of that which is beyond itself that it becomes a cognitive system.

this means that there exists a memory stored within an atom, molecule, tissue, organism, city, planet, galaxy… even the entire universe. it is now the task to figure out how a memory can be transferred from one to another physical configuration to understand what type of cognition (‘know how’ or ‘know that’) it had.

I think that knowledge is possible without memory, but on a subconscious level. For instance, a person with senile dementia might forget a lot about their life but then just before they die they might have a moment of clarity and remember everything, say their goodbyes, and then die.

unless u’ve already been there and done that, i wonder how u “know” about what happens to persons’ thoughts just before they die ^_^

yes, we do have the capacity to inductively operate upon the mental models we harbor and imagine all sorts of things. all of those things also qualify as knowledge, according to me, for they are memories… even fleeting and unconscious ones.

Hi Justin,
Great discussion. Nice to see that you have raised interesting questions. One of them is: “Is know-that knowledge simply a recognition of (or knowledge of) normative obligations?”. I am not sure that what you are getting at. I tend to think that there is no necessary element of ‘obligation’ in ‘knowing-that’ cases. For example, I know that there is a table in my room. It is an instance of ‘know-that’ knowledge. I have no obligation to the table. Knowing that there is a table in my room does not necessarily mean that I ought to do something about it. Of course I can do something about it; but that is optional. It seems to me that no ‘normative obligation’ is attached with the above mentioned case of ‘know-that’ knowledge. What do you think?

Knowledge implies something that is known. But all knowledge is not complete, ie. knowing-that and knowing-how, knowing-that it seems only entails knowledge-of something whereas knowing-how entails and encompasses complete knowledge of the thing known and how it relates or is capable of relating in all relationships to other things including self. KNowing that ice is cold won’t save me when I step on it, I also need to know that it is slippery when walked on, knowing-how it is allows me to keep my food cold at the beach. Wisdom is know-how which incorporates know-that, but not vice versa totally, that is learning about something which builds know-that into know-how.

Knowledge implies something that is known. But all knowledge is not complete, ie. knowing-that and knowing-how, knowing-that it seems only entails knowledge-of something whereas knowing-how entails and encompasses complete knowledge of the thing known and how it relates or is capable of relating in all relationships to other things including self. KNowing that ice is cold won’t save me when I step on it, I also need to know that it is slippery when walked on, knowing-how it is allows me to keep my food cold at the beach. Wisdom is know-how which incorporates know-that, but not vice versa totally, that is learning about something which builds know-that into know-how.